The civil war which tore up Switzerland in 1847, as well as the subsequent changes in the institutions of that country, had avowedly their cause in the aversion and dread of the Jesuits, their teaching and their intrigues. The first use made of the victory was the confiscation of ecclesiastical and conventual property, and soon afterward the new constitution enacted that "the Jesuits and religious communities connected with them were not to be received in any part of Switzerland." This clause became more stringent still in 1874 when the fundamental compact was revised: it excluded the Jesuits from all action in Church or School," and empowered the Federal Government to extend the prohibition, by mere decree, to all religious orders whose doings should appear dangerous to the State, or should disturb the peace among the denominations." This prohibition is to this day in full vigor; Switzerland has succeeded in getting rid of that order which many are pleased to describe as subtle and cunning enough to evade the laws. There is no reason, therefore, why France should not succeed as well as the neighboring republic in excluding the obnoxious society.

It is not, perhaps, out of place to add that, during the war of a majority of the Swiss cantons against the Sonderbund, public opinion in England was decidedly opposed to the Jesuits and their cause, that the English Government countenanced the Federal authority in its proceedings against cantonal rights, and that Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, prevented by all sorts of dilatory proceedings the intervention of France and Austria, and thus secured the success of the Radicals. Lord Palmerston, in his letter of the 20th November, 1847, to Lord Ponsonby, requires that the foundation of the arrangements should be, that the Jesuits should be removed from the whole of the territory of the Confederation, because," he writes, we are now quite convinced that things have gone so far, and popular feeling has been so strongly roused against them, that unless they leave Switzerland entirely there is no chance of peace in that country.

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I am very far from wishing to justify all the laws which Prince Bismarck has obtained from the Reichstag and from the Prussian Parliament against the Roman Catholic clergy. Although he alleges the necessity of maintaining the rights of the State against the Church, he appears to me to have gone farther than this position required, and to have interfered in ecclesiastical concerns beyond the necessities of the case. But, however that may be, it is clear that the celebrated statesman judged the pretensions of the Catholic Church a serious danger to the State, since he would hardly otherwise have gone out of his way, and that on the very morrow of a great war and of the creation of a united Germany, to meddle with the religion of a third of the population of Prussia, and of

three fifths of the subjects of the new empire. It is also worthy of remark that the principal measures of Prince Bismarck in that direction were the expulsion of the Jesuits, the exclusion of the clergy from the inspection of schools, and the subjection of young men preparing for holy orders to a course of university life and to State examinations, with a view to bring them into contact with common life and lay society, and thus to withdraw them from an exclusively episcopal influence. Prince Bismarck, I conclude, has seen the peril with the same eyes as the French Republicans, and he has acted on a similar conviction, that education is the chosen instrument of the Catholic Church in her endeavors to recover the position she was deprived of by the Reformation and the Revolu tion.

It might be objected that the example of Switzerland and Germany is not conclusive, the majority of the population of those countries being Protestant, and therefore naturally disposed to slight what may be the legitimate claims of the Catholic Church, or the well-founded demands of religious toleration. Where Catholicism is dominant, however, and where the rivalry of churches does not exist, we find the State equally engaged in maintaining its supremacy against the encroachments of the clergy, in curtailing the ecclesiastical privileges of former times. Italy, when she attained independence and unity as a kingdom, did not limit her warfare with the Church to the secularization of Rome : she swept away the greater number of the religious orders, and inflicted on the clergy that most galling breach of its old prerogative, the subjection of priests to military service. Still more to the point is the history of the Austrian Concordat. The Holy See and the Episcopate had entered with alacrity into the reactionary policy of the Emperor Francis Joseph after 1849. A capital opportunity it seemed to them of shaking off those restrictions upon the rights of the Church which were known under the name of Josephinism. A Concordat was agreed to in 1855, which remains as the official programme of Catholicism. The holy Roman religion was to be forever maintained throughout the Austrian Empire, with all the rights and privileges which belong to it in virtue of the divine order and of Canon Law." Private as well as public schools were placed under the control of the Episcopate. The same with the press: books censured by ecclesiastical authority were to be considered as legally prohibited. The religious consecration of marriage was declared necessary for its validity. The higher clergy were no longer amenable to lay tribunals, and bishops recovered the right of visiting refractory priests with temporal punishment. A memorable piece of legislation, for the Catholic Church has here betrayed, in an authentic form and with rare sincerity or impru dence, the end to which converge all her efforts. Weak, and hav

ing to struggle for assistance, she appeals to the liberties of citizens, she claims the benefit of constitutional institutions; strong and supported by despotism, she throws off the mask, calls upon the State to enforce her dictates, makes orthodoxy the condition of citizenship, and sets her face against free thought and religious toleration. This, however, is more than our times can bear, and such attempts can never succeed but by surprise and momentarily, When Austria, after Sadowa, tried to raise herself from the state of disintegration and decay into which she had fallen, the first care of Count von Beust was to abrogate the worst parts of the contract entered into with Rome. Six years later, in 1874, the Concordat itself was cancelled, and, what is noteworthy, by the will of one only of the contracting parties, and in spite of the protestations of the Holy See-a terrible slight to its authority, a terrible" blow to its pretension of treating with the kingdoms of the earth on a footing of equality, not to say with the condescension of superior toward its inferiors!

Last though not least significant in this review of the Catholic nations of Europe comes Belgium, where the battle between Church and State is being actually fought, and with as much bitterness as in France itself. The cause of disseusion is, as usual, public instruction, the State, in conformity to the principles of religious equality, wishing to keep the schools open to all persuasions, and therefore to render them independent of the priest, and the priest insisting upon having free access to them. But what gives the Belgian contest a particular claim to our attention is the evidence it supplies that Catholicism, in spite of its appeals to general and eternal principles, varies its attitude according to circumstances. In Belgium, a country where the clergy retains considérable influence, they have had recourse to excommunication as a means of coercing the schoolmasters, and of thus bringing public instruction to a dead lock, and the State into hopeless difficulties, while such extremities are carefully avoided in countries like France, where believers are few or lukewarm, and spiritual thunders would frighten nobody.

I do not give the foregoing considerations for more than they are worth, but only as being sufficient to make_foreigners pause before condemning the religious policy of the French Republic. That the proceedings against the religious congregations have been sanctioned by an immense majority in the Chamber of Deputies and very nearly by half the Senate; that they have been approved of by men of undoubted wisdom and moderation, and that the efforts of Republican France to get rid of monastic orders, and in particular to wrest from their hands the instruction of youth, are but an incident in the battle actually fought in all Catholic lands between the sovereignty of the State and the theocracy of the

Church-all that is, indeed, no proof that the French Government is right, but it is enough to make people look closer into the merits of the case before they bandy about accusations of Jacobin intolerance. Let us, then, after these preliminary considerations, come now to the real issue. It will be found, I believe, that the main objection to the conduct of M. Grévy's government comes to this: the recent measures taken against the religious orders constitute a violation of the liberty of the citizen, a violation the more to be condemned as it comes from a republic-that is, a form of government generally considered as implying a larger share of freedom. This is the argument which has been reproduced usque ad nauseam by the opponents of the seventh clause and of the late decrees. Other objections, such as the legality of those measures, or the benefit which State schools would derive from monastic competition, are too slight to come into comparison with the plea drawn from the so-called liberal position. And yet I must confess that I never could feel the cogency of that argument. Is liberty a first principle, a religious dogma, placed above all contestation and limitation, or is it simply the balance of conflicting interests, the adjustment of opposite claims, a matter of expediency, a right susceptible of augmentation and diminution, subject like every exercise of human activity to the conditions of social life, to the security and welfare of the commonwealth? To put the question is to answer it. I forget who was the orator who, in the days of our first revolution, uttered the celebrated exclamation: Let colonies perish rather than a principle!" Well, is there, I ask, any one ready to say, Let France and her institutions go to ruin rather than suppress a number of monastic orders or deprive them of the right of teaching! Or shall we be met by that favorite plea of the doctrinaires of Liberalism, according to which liberty has in itself the power to remedy the evils to which it is liable? Liberty, according to this position, is like Achilles' lance, which was able to cure the wounds it inflicted. An elegant commonplace, with some little truth in it, but truth which by no means allows of such generalization. It is with that saying as with another famous aphorism, according to which martyrs are the seed of the Church. All very well, but the Church has nevertheless been in many cases and places eradicated by persecution. There is, besides, no fair play, and there can be none, in a contest between a powerful body like the Catholic Church and a nation like the French, where no other free agency, no other national pursuit is organized. Experience, at all events, shows that lay initiative with us has so far been totally unable to compete with the action of the clergy.

If nobody is found so convinced of the sacredness of abstract principles as to set them above all restrictions, we then come down to lower ground, to a qualified proposition, and we have to ex

amine whether the dangers threatened to the State and to society by the monastic orders are such as to justify an infringement upon the liberties of Frenchmen.

The dangers apprehended from the Catholic Church are of two sorts. Some are of a political, others are of a more social nature. The Church is denounced, both as hostile to republican institutions and as exercising a baneful influence on education, and generally on the morality, the dignity, and the welfare of society. In a speech addressed to a popular audience M. Gambetta once pointed to Clericalism as being "the enemy." The converse holds good, and the republic has from the first been treated by the Catho lic Church as an adversary. Nor, I must say, is the mutual suspicion or aversion unfounded, but rather based upon a right instinct. A republic is the most direct expression of the principle of popular government, of the sovereignty of the national will, and that principle, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, is the great heresy of modern times. Besides. if, theoretically speaking, there is no reason why a republic should not profess orthodoxy as well as a kingdom or an empire, yet as matters stand, and taking the conditions of modern society as they are, a republic certainly excludes all forms of State religion.

It could not, without violating its fundamental law, subordinate civil rights to a religious profession, or grant privileges to a relig ious community. As its government represents the aggregate of citizens, and as these belong to various denominations, or, it may be, to no denomination at all, it would be to the detriment of equality if a particular creed were set up as national, and prerogatives attached to it. Without, therefore, entering here into the merits of established churches in countries where politics and religion have been gradually evolving out of past conditions, and where there is a general repugnance to break off the thread of tradition, I take it that a republic, and especially a republic set up, as was the case with us, on the ruins of old forms and institutions, has for its logical sequence a systematic indifference to religious questions as such. It lacks theological qualification-it cannot enter into the merits or demerits of a creed. This is the meaning of that lay character of the State of which we hear so much now. It has been said that “La République ne va pas à la messe," and the saying may pass as a blunt way of expressing the state of things I have just described. It does not by any means imply that the republic is an enemy to religion; it sets out the inevitable antagonism of a lay government to a religious society which believes itself commissioned to bring nations and states under the sway of infallible authority. Catholicism is aware of that antagonism; it is conscious that it lies in the nature of things, and in spite of occa